White coal miners, led by the Knights of Labor, violently attack their Chinese co-workers in Rock Springs, Wyoming, killing 28 and burning the homes of 75 Chinese families. The white miners want the Chinese barred from working in the mine. The mine owners and operators had brought in the Chinese ten years earlier in a successful attempt to keep labour costs down by dividing the workers and suppressing strikes.

Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnam a republic and independent from France. Half a million people gather in Hanoi to hear him read the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, modeled on the U.S. Declaration of Independence. France refuses to recognize Vietnam's independence and sends troops to put down the independence movement. France hangs on another nine years until French forces are crushed by the Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu.

About one thousand members of the ‘Sons of Freedom’ Doukhobors begin a trek out of their village of Krestova in British Columbia, Canada. They leave behind the ruins of two hundred homes which they have themselves burnt to the ground, as a way of showing their freedom from property. They are trekking to a jail, about 650 kilometres away, where some 200 men from the community are imprisoned for acts of bombing and arson. At the root of the situation is a conflict between Doukhobors who have compromised their traditional beliefs by buying land, and the Freedomites, who believe that land should not be owned as private property, and that it is wrong to compromise with state authority or wealth.